Hello! Welcome to my blog, Abundance. Its main purposes are (1) to develop my full picture of post-scarcity politics, & (2) to provide me some structure for practicing my writing. I’ll utilize current events, philosophy, & popular media to analyze a topic & propose strategies toward alternatives.
FYI: this Friday 9/18 at 3pm ET, I’ll be appearing on the Public Banking Institute’s livestream with Ellen Brown & Robert Hockett to talk about how the Federal Reserve is bailing out Wall Street but not the states.
My intention here is to explain the role scarcity plays in justifying the status quo & why deconstructing it is the first step in taking collective action toward alternatives.
To start, there are three basic ways to set up the collective action problem:
The “state of nature”
The “prisoner’s dilemma”
The “tragedy of the commons”
Thomas Hobbes’ 1651 book Leviathan argues individuals have no “natural” mechanisms to build trust & reciprocity. No enforcement of promises, contracts, or agreements leads to what he calls the “state of nature”: a “war of all against all” & life that is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, & short.” So it is in the self-interest of individuals to consent to the authority of the state in order to move toward more optimal social & economic outcomes than could otherwise be achieved. This is the basic justification for the state as it exists today & what is known as “social contract theory.”
The prisoner’s dilemma tells a similar story. There are two prisoners deciding whether to stay silent (“cooperating”) with their accomplice or to betray them to reduce their own prison sentence (“defecting”). It would be optimal for them both to cooperate & serve one year (top-left quadrant below), but the incentive structure results in both of them betraying the other (bottom-right quadrant). The implication here is the necessity for a third-party enforcer to ensure the two’s silent cooperation. (This explains the function of “codes of silence” & norms against snitching, especially in corrupt & violent institutions such as police, gangs, etc. See: The Wire.)
Garrett Hardin’s 1968 article “The Tragedy of the Commons” again sets up a similar problem. Within the context of a pastoral commons for herding cattle:
As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain... [concluding] that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another; and another... But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing the commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit - in a world that is limited... Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.
This simple model argues for the necessity for an enforcer that can temper the “natural” maximizing impulses of human beings. Hardin disturbingly goes on to apply this thinking to the issue of overpopulation, supporting Thomas Malthus’ argument for the need for population control & rejecting child-bearing as a human right because, if left unchecked, it would lead to a tragedy of the commons.
The problem here isn’t these stories’ conclusion—we do need an enforcing solution to collective action problems—but its premise about human nature. Because they assume individuals have narrow self-interest—Hobbes’ lack of “natural” trust, the prisoners avoiding jail time, & Hardin’s maximizing impulse—there is a subtle bait-and-switch: any solution must also be based on selfish human nature. And the implication here is people inherently don’t have the capacity for collective action because they are always incentivized to “free ride,” enjoying the benefits of collective action while others bear the costs.
This assumption & conclusion pair is what I call the “scarcity model.” (Note: I’m setting up a strawman to argue against. Many “egoist” economists have nuanced responses to the criticism laid out here, such as “bounded rationality,” which I am sympathetic to.)
The scarcity model plays an instrumental role in the development of neoliberalism: the enclosure of goods by private interests backed by a state’s monopoly on violence. The two main neoliberal actors—private owners & their state-enforcers—together constitute the ruling class (e.g., corporations, their lobbyists & policymakers, career civil servants, police, military, corporate media, elite associations/nonprofits, etc.). Rather than the question of how to design the enforcing institutions being open to deliberation by the governed via democracy, the neoliberal system closes the design possibilities to this one specific arrangement. Since any solution must be based on individual self-interest, profit-seeking owners are therefore the only possible answer to the collective action problem posed above. With the scarcity model built into the dominant political & social institutions—workplaces, schools, media/culture—people begin to internalize this as “the way the world is” & no longer see it as a topic of debate—slowly becoming the fish unaware of the water they are swimming in.
On the other end, popular movements—labor, Black Lives Matter, environmental, feminist, LGBTQ, immigrant—seek to expand the scope of goods for all (e.g., health care, education, housing, clear air & water). Movements contest the scarcity model’s assumption of selfishness with solidarity & its conclusion of elite control as an ongoing political question. Specific terrains of struggle emerge when movements identify where the ruling class exerts its power most violently & obviously—police brutality & occupation, exploitative bosses, gentrification, corruption, hate crimes, natural disasters—which is why these are today’s political flashpoints. (A trick to identifying where the scarcity model exists in society is figuring out where “objectivity” is a background assumption: “unbiased” journalism, the judiciary or central bank “existing above politics,” law enforcement officers “just doing their job,” etc. By assuming what those objective values are & cultivating them through the dominant institutions, it’s an attempt at the “removal of politics” from power centers.)
Movements’ struggles pose a serious challenge to the political & economic elite—it constitutes an attack on the scarcity model & therefore the power structure itself. Because of the tension between the ever-expanding enclosure of goods by the ruling class & the material effects borne by the most vulnerable, elite control must intensify as popular attempts fight back via democracy. The lack of a coherent coronavirus federal policy response, layered on top of the existing struggles, is an example of this: the economy collapses, the corporate sector is bailed out, the most vulnerable continue facing the life-and-death consequences, the amplified struggles lead to historic street-actions & movement-building, state & vigilante repression mounts to quell the rising calls for genuine democracy.
We saw this play out historically as movements’ successes—notably the New Deal & Great Society eras—faced backlash from the ruling class. Rather than see their power threatened by new generations of movements, they used their levers of control to instill an overwhelming belief system—the scarcity model—in the population in order to justify the status quo. This elite-counteroffensive took hold with the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan & Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, including campaigns like COINTELPRO, foreign coups & terrorism, union-busting, mass incarceration, etc. They contributed two of the most important neoliberal slogans, still reverberating through the political mainstream today:
Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.
…
There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first.
Reagan’s anti-government line shouldn’t be mistaken for principled anti-statism, since he was more than happy to use the state apparatus of the police & military in its proper neoliberal role of controlling the population. He is instead using “government” here as a stand-in for popular movements, since government (unfortunately for the ruling class) had actually been somewhat accountable to the public for the two preceding generations. Authentic government (i.e., democracy) is a “problem” for Reagan insofar as it contradicts the scarcity model he was elected to represent. So this statement kills two birds with one stone: it advocates for corporate rule & disguises it with an ill-defined anti-establishment sentiment.
Thatcher’s anti-society line is explicitly individualistic, describing human beings as “homo economicus:” self-interested automata devoid of collective agency. Similar to Reagan, “society” here is a stand-in for popular movements, & the ruling class’ most powerful tool to destroy them is to outright reject their existence. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: when individualism is internalized as a natural fact & we aren’t able to even conceptualize social units, the doors to collective action close & movements are successfully stifled.
So scarcity serves an ongoing function. It is the justifying belief (ideology) for the underlying system (capitalism). In order to meaningfully change the system, we must identify this ideological seed of scarcity in its explicit & implicit forms, root it out, & plant new beliefs of abundance as the justifying basis for alternatives.
Elinor Ostrom provides a (Nobel Prize-winning) counter argument to the scarcity model with her theory on “common-pool resource management”—giving us an initial seed of abundance. At the heart of her critique is the fact the model is too simple. She contrasts by noting the complexity, or context-specific variables, of collective actions:
Instead of there being a single solution to a single problem, I argue that many different solutions exist to cope with many different problems. Instead of presuming that optimal institutional solutions can be designed easily and imposed at low cost by external authorities, I argue that ‘getting the institutions right’ is a difficult, time-consuming, conflict-invoking process... Instead of presuming that the individuals sharing a commons are inevitably caught in a trap from which they cannot escape, I argue that the capacity of individuals to extricate themselves from various types of dilemma situations varies from situation to situation.
This critique highlights a key defect of neoliberalism. It assumes there is a one-size-fits-all solution to every collective action problem—a top-down enforcer of private corporations backed by a police state—stripped of all values other than individual profit. This explains both too much & too little: too much, in that it attempts to capture a flaw of human nature applicable to all contexts, & too little, in that it reduces the richness of human agency to simple outputs of material benefit.
By assuming non-monetary values like solidarity, dignity, family, community, participation, culture, etc., out of the system, any broader ethical commitments are viewed as “irrational” or “backwards” (which is also conveniently ideological ammo for racism, sexism, etc.), despite overwhelming counter-examples of individuals acting against their immediate self-interest for some of these non-monetary values. And because these values are much closer to the truth of the human condition, there is ample room to find holes in the system & build alternatives that meet these needs. (This is especially true in moments of crisis when the system’s failures are most apparent, like we are currently experiencing.)
So we ought to shift the focus of our politics away from scarcity’s fixed model toward a view of political constructs as open to redefining. This gives us new imaginative space (to envision alternatives), organizing space (to build collective power toward the envisioned alternatives), & transformative space (to see the change actualized via exercised collective agency). Openness doesn’t imply we ought to jettison one old model for one new one; this is a call to be able to see the world through a pluralism of models. (This doesn’t come easy! It requires genuine self-education & continually developing a critical analysis of the world, questioning the system’s underlying assumptions.)
Ostrom’s model below (which I share all the time without this preceding explanation) outlines some of the structural variables affecting cooperation/defection feedback loops, providing a contrast with the scarcity model that is closer to the complex, messy reality. This can serve as a tool for imagining alternative ways of working together, organizing ourselves to get there, & what transformed institutions should take into account (both prefigurative & eventual mainstream ones).
High marginal per capita return (MPCR) of cooperation. (“What do I get out of it?”)
Security that contributions will be returned if not sufficient. (E.g., a GoFundMe’s promise to refund if the goal isn’t met makes people more likely to contribute.)
The reputations of participants are known. (E.g., restaurant reviews.)
Longer time horizon. (E.g., if a stranger cuts me off on the road, I’m more likely to “defect” by road raging. If I know the person is my mother, I know I shouldn’t because I have a long time horizon with her & I’ll have to deal with the consequences later.)
Capability to choose to enter or exit a group. (“I don’t like the rules here! Make them better or I’ll find a better group.”)
Communication is feasible with the full set of participants. (If someone is cooperating/defecting, are you able to follow up with them about it?)
Size of group. (The bigger the group, the easier it is for a defector to hide.)
Information about the average contribution is available. (If you can see what the norm is, you are more likely to default to it.)
Sanctioning capabilities. (If someone defects, there are consequences.)
Heterogeneity in benefits and costs. (What you get is proportionate to what you give. If the system is all-or-nothing, like the scarcity model, people are more likely to defect.)
The social problems we face—climate change, war, economic exploitation, pandemics, white supremacy, immigration, heteropatriarchy, etc.—should all look different in this light. Rather than deciding how to split up a fixed scarce pie, it is about the hard work of “getting the institutions right.” The question isn’t how “I get mine;” it’s how we take collective action at all the levels necessary to address the crises—in our homes, neighborhoods, cities, regions, states, countries, & world.
Congratulations on an impressive, stimulating premiere piece, Michael. It's a fine distillation of our socio-cultural predicament and a solid platform for constructing your next installment. I look forward to it!